paulgalow.com

Hi, I'm Paul Galow, and I'm an engineer based in Leipzig specialising in AWS with a focus on Serverless. I'm also an IT manager and a Mac admin.

AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional (SAP-C02): Recommendations for passing the exam

“That’s it, I’m out”. Those were my initial thoughts when I attempted to answer the first questions of my exam. I had just waited an hour to…

Transcode Internet radio and video streams to HTTP MP3 streams with racoder

In my household, we’ve been listening to spoken-word radio for years. Our favorite station is BBC Radio 4 Extra, a no-news, no-music program…

AWS Route 53 least privilege IAM policy for Let's Encrypt DNS challenge

If you are using AWS Route 53 as your DNS provider, you might have been surprised after consulting the service’s documentation for IAM…

How to work with JSON API data in macOS shell scripts without external dependencies

Update January 2022 Thanks to @Pico on MacAdmins Slack, I have been made aware of another potential RCE attack vector and how to mitigate it…

Create a custom Wowza Streaming Engine module with Eclipse and Docker

tl;dr Follow Wowza’s official instructions to set up Eclipse. Then, customize compiler settings by installing and linking a compatible Java…

What macOS version did I just download? (Big Sur edition)

A new macOS release ≠ a new version A few days ago, Apple released an updated build of macOS 11.0.1 to address a bug that prevented some…

How to check for internet connectivity with vanilla Node.js

How often do you think about internet connectivity of your server-side applications? Most of the time I don’t. I assume “the cloud” is just…

Managing ignored system updates on macOS with Puppet

tl;dr I have published a simple Puppet module to manage softwareupdate’s list of ignored updates. This can be used to hide the banner…

macOS Quick Action to rename photos and videos by timestamp

Have you ever transferred a bunch of photos/videos from an iOS device using AirDrop? If so you will have noticed the odd file names of those…

Managing Firefox extensions via configuration profiles on macOS

In this post we are leveraging the Extensions and InstallAddonsPermission configuration profile keys to manage Firefox extensions. As an…

Download album art from Apple with albumart-dl

I remember the old days before music streaming became ubiquitous. Back then, I used to put a lot of time and care into my music collection…

Securing AWS CLI credentials on macOS with LastPass CLI

One of the sometimes overlooked but incredibly valuable features of Amazon Web Services are roles. Roles allow you to grant access to other…